Driving Performance with Embedded Business Intelligence Analytics in Your Voice Application: Turning Customer Data into Customer Service Excellence for a Competitive Advantage

Article excerpt

Globalization, intense competition and the volatile economic climate are forcing companies to re-evaluate how they manage customer interactions. Customer expectations are higher and budgets are tighter. While companies seek every opportunity to improve the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction, they're carefully watching the bottom line and looking for ways to be more productive by leveraging new applications as a way to help them 'do more with less'.

In today's increasingly competitive marketplace, a company's voice application (i.e. IVR or voice portal) can become an important source of competitive advantage. Indeed, companies with top-performing voice applications typically have more satisfied customers, lower costs, and higher revenue per customer. To achieve these results, however, organizations must rigorously track and analyze key metrics within the voice application--for example, hourly call volumes, task completion, and speech error rates to name a few, and take the appropriate actions to maintain performance levels.

Business Intelligence (BI) analytics and reporting is becoming an invaluable strategy for data analysis that provides a deeper understanding of what is happening in the voice application. Leading edge companies are using BI analytics to examine voice interactions holistically, including the experience prior to reaching an agent and the experience of callers who self-serve. The end result is visibility into the caller experience as a predictive indicator of both customer loyalty and total cost per call.

Once considered too complex and expensive to be practical, technology has advanced to make BI analytics easily accessible through a built-in integration into the voice application. Software as a Service (SaaS) is the ideal way to implement a BI analytics solution in tough economic times. SaaS is faster to implement, much less expensive than a standalone BI analytics solution that is not part of the voice application, and it carries a much lower risk burden than traditional enterprise software.

LACK OF VOICE APPLICATION DATA DAMAGES THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Analytics is a concept that's been around for a long time. Web analytics is used to measure, collect, analyze and report internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Speech analytics analyzes speech patterns, focusing on caller tone and keywords with agent interactions, and turns that information into reportable customer data. …